Distribution of spam by country in the past 4 months

Sophos recently posted on its Naked Security blog the top 12 countries relaying spam for the past quarter (July – September). I thought I would go and do my own comparison.

Before I post the results, here are some disclaimers:

This is only on post-IP blocked mail. If we were including those stats, these statistics could look different.

This is based upon our customer base; it should not be extrapolated into assuming that this is what the global make up of spam looks like. Indeed, it most likely is not representative since our audience skews heavily towards the United States.

So without further ado, how does it look?

You can see that there isn’t a lot of overlap here other than the US being the largest source of spam that hits us. Given how different these values are, it’s clear that there is a lot of difference between how Sophos measures spam and how I am measuring it.

The last column is how spammy mail from that particular country is. Yes, the US produces the most spam, but the bulk of the mail we receive (after IP blocks) is non-spammy. By contrast, the US dwarfs mail from Russia but almost half of Russian email is spam. Hungary is even worse.

Eventually I’ll be able to get statistics for before IP blocks. Until then, this is what I have.